The present invention relates to a shopping cart pulling system for moving a line of nested shopping carts. Particularly, the present invention relates to a reelable retaining cord mechanism and a hitch for engaging a line of carts.
When shopping in many types of stores, it is frequently necessary for the store to provide shopping carts for customers to place items that are to be purchased while the customer is selecting additional items. One type of store in which carts are typically used is supermarkets. After purchasing items, the customer typically uses the shopping cart to transport the purchased items to the customer's automobile. Once the purchased items are transferred from the shopping cart to the customer's automobile, the shopping carts are typically left in the parking lot or returned to a cart corral.
Employees of the store collect shopping carts on a regular basis and then return the shopping carts to the store for subsequent customers to use. To assist in returning the shopping carts to the store, the shopping carts are typically designed to partially nest inside each other so that a line of nested shopping carts may be simultaneously returned to the store.
A draw-back of simultaneous returning a line of nested shopping carts to the store is that a substantial amount of force must be used to move the line of nested shopping carts. The force needed to move the line of nested shopping carts becomes even greater when the parking lot is not level or when the parking lot is covered with snow and ice.
In many instances, employees become injured when moving the line of nested shopping carts. Typical injuries range from strained muscles to broken limbs. These types of injuries frequently lead to lost work or time for the employees and higher workers' compensation insurance premiums for the store.
To alleviate injuries to them, stores use motorized shopping cart moving devices to move the line of nested shopping carts back to the store. The prior art motorized shopping cart moving devices utilize a single reel retaining cord mechanism. This retaining cord mechanism was disadvantageous since either the tension was too great when the retaining cord was strung around the line of carts, or too little when the retaining cord was disengaged from the carts and reeled into the reel box.
Additionally, the prior art motorized shopping cart moving devices used an open jaw hitch to engage the line of carts. To engage or disengage the line of carts from the motorized cart mover, the operator had to manually lift the first cart onto or off of the open-jawed hitch. This increased the risk of injury to the operator.